The Enterprise Edge: Accelerating the Journey to Digital Transformation 2.0

What’s next in digital transformation? It’s the evolution of the “enterprise edge,” an emerging services hub for the collection and distribution of data and as a key enabler in the transformation to a digital-native enterprise. It plays a central role in meeting new business opportunities, from empowering frontline employees, to automating data collection, storage, analytics, and insights that feed critical business intelligence needs.

Our expert panelists will explore the ways in which successful transformation of the enterprise edge creates an evolution of the enterprise network architecture, fueling the next leg of digital transformation. It aligns all organization resources, including key assets closer to the edge, to offer operational advances, richer customer and employee experiences, and higher economic rewards.

We’ll discuss:
•How a transformed network edge helps meet demands for speedier decision-making, unlimited and quick access to cloud applications, and stricter quality of service parameters.
•The role of “disruptive networkers” and how they leverage advanced data networks, such as SD-WAN, the cloud, and automation.
•Understanding where your company fits on the Digital Journey Index which was developed by IDC in conjunction with Comcast Business, to help track the progress of your digital journey.
•New architectural choices that allow enterprises to transform to digital-native and move toward a more intelligent, automated, and flexible network that allows them to react quickly and effectively to a changing business environment.

Our panelists include:
•Ghassan Abdo, research vice president in IDC’s Telecommunications group, covers the evolution of the Telco Cloud Ecosystem as well as the emerging Virtualized Enterprise Networking services.
•Jeff Lewis, vice president of product management for Comcast Business. Jeff oversees the company’s evolution of next-generation networking, cloud, data center, Wi-Fi, and Internet solutions for business.

Whether it’s caused by hardware failure, human error, natural disaster, cyber-attack, or other issue, downtime can have a serious impact on your business. Your employees and customers expect constant connectivity and a seamless experience. Fortunately, the cloud’s 24/7 anytime/anywhere service, elasticity, immediate connectivity, automated backup, and related features make it easier to maintain business continuity. More than 81 percent of enterprises recognize the BC/DR advantages of the cloud and employ a multi-cloud strategy, and more than half (51 percent) have a hybrid cloud strategy, according to RightScale. While the hybrid cloud can optimize business continuity, it needs to be architected to do so.

Join us on February 23rd at 1 p.m. ET for ““Business Continuity in the Hybrid Cloud: The Obsolescence of Downtime,” a webinar from Comcast Business, to learn from our expert panelists how to develop an infrastructure that considers business continuity—and keeping downtime at bay—as a core function.

We’ll explore:
• The role of direct connectivity in maximizing business continuity
• Specializing infrastructures to meet specific workload requirements
• Setting rules to control user access and connections between different resources
• Prioritizing what data must be recovered first, setting recovery point objectives (RPO), and determining recovery time objectives (RTO)
• Duplicating your infrastructure in the cloud

Even with network advancements taking place during the past couple years, the majority of IT support issues continue to be reported by users. There exists a clear opportunity to improve network performance—and, as a result, the digital and customer experience—through greater transparency. In fact, eliminating “blind spots” with end-to-end visibility in an environment in which end users, apps, networks, and infrastructure are more distributed than ever before is key to that objective.

In “Driving Customer & Digital Experience through Visibility and Network Insights,” a webinar from Comcast Business on Thursday, March 28th at 1 p.m. EST, our expert panelists will discuss what it takes to leverage what already exists in your network infrastructure to optimize its performance, resulting in the best possible digital and customer experience.

The webinar will cover:
• Network and security monitoring tools geared to mining insights
• Identifying insights that are critical to network optimization
• Leveraging insights to improve the digital and user experience across the network
• Tools that support a wide range of applications, including SaaS, packaged, or hosted, and is tightly integrated with application performance management (APM)
• Use cases: Digital and customer experience support

Our panelists:

• Geoff Woollacott, Senior Strategy Consultant, Principal Analyst at Technology Business Research , focuses on emerging technologies and their business implications for customer adoption.

• Teresa Ward-Maupin, vice president of Customer and Digital Experience at Comcast Business is responsible for driving the Customer Experience strategy and execution as well as expanding Comcast Business’s Digital Experience properties.

According to Nemertes Research, among the core technologies supporting digital transformation are cloud, analytics, collaboration, contact center, and mobility. Key to harnessing the power of those technologies is Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) and organizations are increasingly aware of it potential. In fact, Nemertes’s data shows UCC spending increased by 46.2 percent in 2018. Like digital transformation itself, UCC and its related technologies have the potential to aid in process improvement, customer engagement, team collaboration, and more.

In “The Critical Role of Unified Communications in Digital Transformation a webinar from Comcast Business on Thursday, February 28th at 1 p.m. EST, our panelists will walk you through the key drivers enabling UCC and its impact on digital transformation initiatives.

Our panelists:
•Irwin Lazar, vice president and service director at Nemertes Research, develops and manages research projects, conducts and analyzes primary research, and advises numerous enterprise and vendor clients. He is responsible for benchmarking the adoption and use of emerging technologies in unified communications and collaboration.
•Jeannette Romero, product management executive director for the Comcast Business Voice product portfolio, leads the development and lifecycle efforts for Comcast Business Class Voice, Mobility, VoiceEdge Select, Business VoiceEdge, PRI, and SIP products.

Data tells us that digital transformation is the focus of nearly every discussion on organizational strategic initiatives. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, 77 percent of businesses state that digital transformation is their first strategic priority. The MIT Sloan Review reveals that 90% of CEOs cite enterprise-wide digital transformation as a core objective of their digital strategy. Given its potential for meeting new business opportunities, empowering frontline employees, automating data collection, storage, analytics, generating insights that feed critical business intelligence needs, and more, that’s not a surprise. Yet, fewer than 15 percent of early maturity digital enterprises have a clearly defined digital strategy. There simply is no roadmap.

But sound examples of successful initiatives exist. Our panelists will walk you through the process Philadelphia Federal Credit Union (PFCU) took in beginning their journey toward digital transformation, starting with moving its network from an MPLS environment to SD-WAN.

Our panelists:
•Richard Costello, IT Manager for Philadelphia Federal Credit Union (PFCU), provides support for everything from database servers and e-mail servers to virtual infrastructure. He has also been involved in several upgrades at PFCU, including core infrastructure, phone system, wireless network replacements, and LAN/WAN data.
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•Jody Hagemann, director of product management, Comcast Business Services, focuses on service operations design, new product launch, and lifecycle management. Currently, she’s developing the Comcast Business ActiveCore℠ platform.

The perspective on Digital Transformation to date has focused on the issues associated with traffic steering and other factors related to optimizing networks for enriched customer experiences, improved organizational communication, and improved efficiencies across the board. But, what’s next? Cloud computing, data analytics, social media, and mobility have helped organizations move more rapidly toward digital transformation, but how will emerging technologies create the next leap? How will virtual/augmented reality, blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), advanced data analytics/predictive analytics come together, along with software-defined networking, to drive digital transformation efforts that will completely change the way networks and companies work?

In “Digital Transformation 2.0 Drivers and Disruptors: Is Your Network Ready for the Future?” a free webinar from Comcast Business on Tuesday, December 18 at 1 p.m. EST, our panelists will look to the future, helping to unlock the possibilities these disruptive technologies might offer.

• John Brzozowski, fellow at machineQ, a Comcast service. As Head of Engineering for Comcast machineQ, John and his team are responsible for core IoT technology development and infrastructure engineering, including architecture, design, and development for both software and hardware.
• Zeus Kerravala, founder & principal analyst, ZK Research, provides a mix of tactical advice to help his clients in the current business climate and long-term strategic advice.

In this webinar, we’ll cover:
•IoT, AI, and virtual/augmented, and machine learning in infrastructure implementation
•The power of predictive analytics, advanced business intelligence, and big data in leveraging decision-making
•Cloud strategies, security needs, and risk management in a changing environment
•The new infrastructure vision: Pulling it all together

Join us on November 15th at 2 p.m. ET for “Driving Digital Transformation Through 2019 and Beyond,” a webinar from Forrester Research and Comcast Business, where our expert panelists will explore the key considerations for successful advanced data network technology adoption and long-term strategy.

We’ll discuss:
•Why Digital Transformation is not a “one-and-done” concept.
•The changing narrative around Digital Transformation, as we shift from adding digital features (1.0), to having digital become a core part of an ongoing enterprise strategy (2.0).
•The ways in which the continuous transformation and evolution of a company’s digital initiatives requires a complete re-think of your business’ go-to-market, including how you interact with your customers, how you drive operational excellence, how you approach innovation, and the technologies you use as the foundation.
•Why companies using advanced data networks to embrace Digital Transformation 2.0 experience proven gains in customer satisfaction, revenue, and employee productivity.
•The technologies you can put to work on your own Digital Transformation journey.

Our panelists include”
•Andre Kindness, principal analyst at Forrester Research, serves IT Infrastructure & Operations Professionals. He is a leading expert on enterprise network operations and architecture. His research focuses on networking technology and strategy—such as software defined networking and network function virtualization—for private cloud, remote locations, and hybrid cloud.
•Allan Langfield, executive director, product management at Comcast Business, is responsible for Product Management, Development and Deployment of the Comcast NFV platform, ActiveCore. Allan’s group is focused on delivering a customer-oriented Digital Experience, enabling and integrating services including SD-WAN.

What’s next in digital transformation? It’s the evolution of the “enterprise edge,” an emerging services hub for the collection and distribution of data and as a key enabler in the transformation to a digital-native enterprise. It plays a central role in meeting new business opportunities, from empowering frontline employees, to automating data collection, storage, analytics, and insights that feed critical business intelligence needs.

Our expert panelists will explore the ways in which successful transformation of the enterprise edge creates an evolution of the enterprise network architecture, fueling the next leg of digital transformation. It aligns all organization resources, including key assets closer to the edge, to offer operational advances, richer customer and employee experiences, and higher economic rewards.

We’ll discuss:
•How a transformed network edge helps meet demands for speedier decision-making, unlimited and quick access to cloud applications, and stricter quality of service parameters.
•The role of “disruptive networkers” and how they leverage advanced data networks, such as SD-WAN, the cloud, and automation.
•Understanding where your company fits on the Digital Journey Index which was developed by IDC in conjunction with Comcast Business, to help track the progress of your digital journey.
•New architectural choices that allow enterprises to transform to digital-native and move toward a more intelligent, automated, and flexible network that allows them to react quickly and effectively to a changing business environment.

Our panelists include:
•Ghassan Abdo, research vice president in IDC’s Telecommunications group, covers the evolution of the Telco Cloud Ecosystem as well as the emerging Virtualized Enterprise Networking services.
•Jeff Lewis, vice president of product management for Comcast Business. Jeff oversees the company’s evolution of next-generation networking, cloud, data center, Wi-Fi, and Internet solutions for business.

A range of powerful technology platforms—mobility, high-performance wireless, AI and the Internet of Things (IoT), smart connected solutions, fast deployments, and of course, digital transformation—share the same backbone: Ethernet. It’s the power behind the seamless delivery of a wide range of applications across networks for an increasingly broad array of industries, including finance, healthcare, retail, federal and municipal organizations, energy, and IT, among others.

Join us on September 27th at 1 p.m. ET for “Ethernet: Building a Bridge to Digital Transformation,” a webinar from Comcast Business, where our expert panelists will explore the role that Ethernet plays in digital transformation, particularly in supporting networks and enterprises.
We’ll explore how Ethernet serves digital transformation by:

• Helping to standardize services, bolster scalability, and enhance both
overall quality and service management.
• Working with other technologies to play a critical role in deploying
applications from the core to the edges of your Wide Area Network.
• Supporting data center, distributed enterprises, and cloud connectivity,
easy integration for IP networks, and network simplification.
• Enabling a wide range of applications, such as imaging, video
telepresence, and BD/DR, and more.

As we head into the 4th quarter, your business needs to be ready for the increased traffic and pressure your network will experience. Holidays, the advent of the football and basketball seasons, back-to-school, vacations, budget planning… In fact, since 2010, the concentration of bandwidth-critical events is higher in Q4 than at any other time of the year (Statista 2018). No matter your industry, the impacts can be felt across the entire business ecosystem. Building a bulwark against the seasonal variation created by increased consumer and commercial activity, and the resulting pressure on your network to meet those demands, can be your best defense.

Join us on August 30th at 1 p.m. EST for “Is Your Network Ready for the Busy Season?,” a free webinar from Comcast Business. Expert panelists from Nemertes Research and Comcast Business will help you get ahead of the challenges and opportunities presented this time of year and plan next year’s priorities.

You’ll gain a deeper understanding of:
•Steps you can take to upgrade and safeguard your existing architecture today.
•Solutions designed to shore up your network, including, cloud, multi-WAN, wireless backup, and more.
•Long-term planning to prepare for future network fluctuations.

Today’s digital economy and its associated requirements for your business are constantly evolving. From headquarters to branch offices, unified communications is key to building a better bridge for collaboration across your distributed enterprise.

Join us on July 26 at 1 p.m. ET for “Unified Communications: Creating a Modern Collaboration Model,” a webinar from Comcast Business, to understand how hosted capabilities are evolving to create more unified communications and greater productivity for an increasingly mobile workforce.

You’ll learn how to:
•Rethink communications for a distributed, modern workforce
•Develop a “user-first” mentality for unified communications
•Administer new services for greater employee productivity and customer satisfaction

Hear from our expert panelists:
-John Guillaume, vice president, product management and strategy, at Comcast Business, is responsible for managing its voice, unified communications, and SaaS portfolio. He is also head of UX for Comcast Business and leads the software developers and designers.

-Diane Myers, senior research director, VoIP, UC, and IMS, at Infonetics/IHS, leads the company’s arrier VoIP/IMS and enterprise telephony coverage, authoring numerous market share and forecast reports, service provider and end-user studies, and Continuous Research Service (CRS) research notes.

Hybrid cloud is shaping a new network reality, and now is the time to ensure your network is ready across all your locations. According to 451 Research, 60 percent of IT environments will reside in the cloud in 2018—up from 45 percent in 2016.The mix of on-premises and cloud-based resources that underpins the hybrid cloud means increased complexity, and legacy networks are simply no longer equipped to meet demands created by bandwidth-intensive environments.

Join us on June 28 at 1 p.m. ET for the “Taking Complexity Out of Connecting to the Cloud” webinar. Our expert panelists will discuss the issues related to operating in a hybrid cloud.

We’ll explore:
• Assessing core infrastructure needs in light of increased complexity;
• The keys to building a seamless hybrid cloud environment geared to scaling;
• Architecting a cloud environment with business continuity in mind;
• Challenges and advantages of multi-cloud architecture; and
• Security considerations.

Legacy MPLS networks weren’t built to optimize network visibility. In an age when nearly 80% of workloads are in the cloud and almost every function is tied to an application, transparency is critical to managing traffic. Gaining the control you need starts with taking an app-first approach.

Software defined networking (SDN) is critical to gauging the breadth of all your applications and to effectively steering traffic to maximize performance. In “Navigating the New, App-Centric Reality,” our panelists will explore how the internet has changed radically in the past 10-15 years; network and infrastructure challenges; how SDN offers greater control; and more.

Our panelists are:
• John Burke, principal research analyst, Nemertes Research, advises key enterprise and vendor clients, conducts and analyzes primary research, and writes thought-leadership pieces across a wide variety of topics.
• Jody Hagemann, director of product management, Comcast Business Services, focuses on service operations design, new product launch, product-to-product migration, and lifecycle management. Her current role is developing the Comcast Business ActiveCore℠ platform.

Participants will gain insights into:
• The landscape of the “new internet”;
• Case study examples of network limitations;
• Applications best served by infrastructure type;
• Application best practices; and
• The keys to unlocking bandwidth constraints.

While your customer-facing and operational branch locations are distributed in nature, they’re increasingly becoming the center of your business. In today’s digital business environment, it’s more important than ever to equip the “edges” of your organization with new capabilities—including network capacity and performance—to meet the evolving expectations of your customers, employees, and partners.

Many branch offices are under-equipped to take advantage of new business opportunities, and today’s IT executives are in a unique position to undertake branch office modernization, thus leading to the delivery of new and improved customer experiences and capabilities to grow the business.

Register for “Branch Office Modernization: Sharpen Your Business Edge” on April 26 at 1 p.m. ET, to learn from our expert panelists about how you can prioritize transformation efforts across your organization:
•Geoff Woollacott, senior strategy consultant, principal
analyst at Technology Business Research
•Jeff Lewis, vice president of product management for
Comcast Business

Attend this webinar, and you will learn:
•How to prioritize transformation efforts across
your organization
•Actionable insights about the inherent challenges in
working across locations and the cultural impact
•How new software-defined solutions can give branch locations
the power they need to boost productivity and remain relevant
in an age of disruption

Everything evolves, and the current evolution in business speed and performance has been led by the cloud. From data centers to workloads, it’s impacted and shifted the way we process and deliver information. In fact, according to the 2018 Cisco Global Cloud Index, cloud data center traffic will represent 95 percent of total data center traffic by 2021 and SaaS workloads will comprise 75 percent of total cloud workloads.

In addition, virtualization in the cloud and across your business network serves as a catalyst for greater automation. Taken together, infrastructure modernization and automation are critical to effectively meeting the increasingly rigorous demands to create new customer experiences and operate more effectively.

Today’s modern businesses require a new foundation for success, and software-defined networks will play a key role. Join us on Wednesday, March 14th, for “Infrastructure Modernization: Software-Defining Your Business,” a free webinar from Comcast Business. Our expert panelists will share insights about:

It’s no surprise that digital transformation is on the minds of enterprise businesses. In fact, according to a recent IDC survey of IT professionals, 94 percent of respondents indicate they are planning or have digital transformation initiatives under way. Connectivity is key to this transformation, and SD-WAN can help maximize that connectivity.

Join us on Tuesday, October 24th at 1:00 p.m. ET as expert panelists discuss the foundations of SD-WAN, its role in digital transformation, and how it can be adopted for your enterprise.

During this interactive discussion, you will:
•Understand SD-WAN and how it helps businesses think “Digital First”
•Recognize the key benefits of SD-WAN
•Learn adoption considerations and pain points
•Explore which deployment models work best

Our panelists for this interactive webinar and discussion will be:
•Ghassan Abdo, research vice president in IDC’s Telecommunications group, covers the evolution of the Telco Cloud Ecosystem as well as the emerging Virtualized Enterprise Networking services.
•Jeff Lewis, vice president of product management for Comcast Business focused on next-generation networking, cloud, data center, Wi-Fi, and Internet solutions for business.

“Digital transformation” isn’t necessarily a quantum leap in technology or even a linear progression—it’s a change that takes place across a spectrum. In fact, you’re likely already in the midst of some form of it. A recent IDC survey reveals that companies across all sectors are applying connected digital technologies—mobile apps, social networks, cloud services, big data and analytics, etc.—to achieve cost reductions, revenue increases, and service improvements.

Clearly, digital transformation is well underway. The question is, how far along the continuum are you and what does it take to fully realize digital transformation? In “Taking Digital Transformation Beyond the Buzz”, a webinar from Comcast Business, our knowledgeable panelists will discuss how rapid changes in technology and culture have impacted changing infrastructure needs; how mobility, analytics, social media, IoT, and future AI workloads are driving greater digitalization and the need for scalable, agile systems; the need to eliminate siloed environments to enable growth; and the ways to assess where your company is on the path to change.

In an environment of rapidly evolving economic and technological change, how can you stay ahead of the competitive curve? The key is digital transformation. It gives you the power to unlock greater cost efficiencies, streamline solution deployment, raise your customer experience game, and much more.

Join John Burke, Principal Research Analyst at Nemertes Research and Jeff Lewis, Vice President of Product Management for Comcast Business, as they walk you through what it takes to leverage digital transformation for your operation.

In an environment of rapidly evolving economic and technological change, how can you stay ahead of the competitive curve? The key is digital transformation. It gives you the power to unlock greater cost efficiencies, streamline solution deployment, raise your customer experience game, and much more.

Join John Burke, principal research analyst at Nemertes Research and Jeff Lewis, vice president of product management for Comcast Business as they walk you through what it takes to leverage digital transformation for your operation. We’ll explore key considerations, such as:

With more than 60% of businesses expected to employ cloud-based applications in the next two years, IT leaders are faced with a host of new challenges and choices when selecting the best cloud options to meet their digital transformation requirements. Managing multiple cloud environments in parallel can be costly, time-consuming and complex, especially if your business runs numerous, disparate cloud applications.

Join Comcast Business Cloud Product Manager, John Keller and 451 Research Chief Analyst, Eric Hanselman, as they identify and break down the keys to transitioning from a multi-cloud environment to a true hybrid cloud strategy designed to for optimal performance and business results.

Key takeaways:
• Anticipating connectivity, bandwidth and over-subscription requirements to move data to the cloud and between clouds
• Where to house your applications - from DevOps to production
• Creating an effective business continuity plan - so that back-up and restore can work as expected